Oh, I see, you are calling glob in scalar context where it returns the number of files matching.
Also, you don't need mget when you have already used glob to resolve the name. get will do in that case:

Ok now I am getting the file names and downloading them the way I was hoping for with one exception. In my script I want a file "IRP_20130410" the remote server has a file named "IRP_20130410000438.txt" The remote windows machine adds 6 characters for time and the ".txt" extension. I want to be able to match the file name I am looking for and don't care about the remaining characters. So can I just put a wild card in the glob?

But there are easier ways to do what you want. For instance, you can use a regular expression matching all the prefixes in @ai_files_day plus $yesterday plus any six digits and let mget download all the files matching:

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other